Shaking off the fetters of novel-adaptation, Helen Edmundson has come up with her first major original play since The Clearing. The result is a serious, deeply felt piece - even if its emotional effect is almost the exact opposite of the one that Edmundson clearly intended.

As in Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul, an Englishwoman has abandoned her family to work in the developing world; the crucial difference here is that we get to hear all the arguments for and against. Jane has left her husband and five-year-old son in Kensal Rise to work for a shelter for street kids in Madras. But she has undergone some form of crisis and is now being looked after by an expatriate woman painter. Husband Mark comes in pursuit of her. What follows is a fierce contest between the claims of home and those of the children's centre as represented by its suavely articulate founder, Srinivas.

Edmundson's aim is clear: to show Jane as a confused idealist caught between two equally importunate masculine demands. And we are obviously meant to feel that Srinivas, who makes a mild pass at her, is a careerist charity-worker as suspect, in his way, as the working-class Mark. But for me it is no real contest. Everything Mark says - including "everyone should just stay in their own countries" - reveals him to be a bullying, racist bigot. Whereas Srinivas, for all that he is a professional charmer, makes the perfectly practical suggestion that Jane should act on her instincts and settle in India with her son.

The play poses a valid and increasingly urgent question: what does a woman who detests the western rat race and cares deeply about child poverty actually do? But having set up the debate, Edmundson muddies it by suggesting that women remain perennial victims of male imperatives. She compounds the point by showing the painter, Frances, to be a solitary exile who has paid a heavy price for abandoning her faithless husband. What angers me is Edmundson's implicit defeatism and her reversal of all the arguments on behalf of individual freedom offered by Ibsen over a century ago in A Doll's House.

It takes a good play, however, to get under one's skin as this one did under mine. And even if John Marquez as Mark is more noisily hectoring than the part demands, there is fine work from Maxine Peake as the emotionally torn Jane, Harry Dillon as the supercilious Srinivas and the peerlessly beautiful Diana Quick as the exiled Frances in Simon Usher's atmospheric production. Edmundson has written a play that asks all the right questions. I only wish it came up with a different, more positive answer.